Li Yinan built a car to meet Huawei! In the past, who can be better in the deep water area?

A Cyrus store displays a prototype car

Li Yinan, who is in charge of "self-traveling home", once again swam to Huawei's "forbidden area".

Although the bitter winter of 2021 has repeatedly let the new energy vehicles driving on the road lie down, it has not frozen the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs.

Following Xiaomi Group (01810.HK), OPPO and Light Orange, on December 25, 2021, the car-making project "Ziyoujia" of Li Yinan, founder of Niu Innovation Energy, was officially announced. At the same time, Li Yinan also said with great enthusiasm that the products of "Self-Traveling Home" are "definitely high-end, this is beyond doubt", and if all goes well, the first product will be officially mass-produced in September 2022.

What is intriguing is that just two days before the advent of "Self-Traveling Home", Li Yinan's former owner Huawei and Xilis, a subsidiary of 601127.SH, launched the first medium-sized luxury SUV of the high-end AITO brand "Q&E M5" with deep empowerment. In this regard, Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's consumer business and CEO of smart car solution BU, also high-profile declared that "the Q&I M5 is comparable to a Million Luxury Car."

As Huawei's "former prince", Li Yinan's experience is both legendary and bumpy; Huawei has also suffered various blows after reaching the top of China's high-end smart phones.

The encounter between Li Yinan and his old owner Huawei must have made many people sigh, but what makes us more curious is what kind of ripples will be stirred up after Li Yinan and Huawei drive into the deep water area of car manufacturing?

Huawei "Prince"

If you work in Huawei step by step, then the person in charge of Huawei's automotive business and even a higher position is likely to be Li Yinan.

As a student of the first junior class of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Li Yinan's joining Huawei can be described as a perfect combination. In 1992, Li Yinan, who was studying for the second year of graduate school, was introduced by his mentor and entered the internship of Huawei, which had only been established for 5 years. Subsequently, Li Yinan began to show his skills in Huawei. According to official information, in June 1993, Li Yinan graduated from graduate school and officially joined Huawei, serving as deputy general manager of Huawei's central research department for nearly half a year.

It is precisely because it can bring more value to Huawei, at this time, not only Ren Zhengfei "loves Li Yinan like a parent", but even the rumors of "prince" that "Li Yinan may become Ren Zhengfei's successor" are not shy. It's just that the more this rumor is, the greater the pressure on the potential heir. When multiple heirs compete for the future leader of the company, some people often attack other competitors by means of killing, and the higher they are, the worse they fall.

However, as "Ren Zhengfei Biography" said, "Li Yinan's experience in Huawei is relatively glamorous, because the road is too smooth, the higher his status, and the greater the potential contradiction between him and Ren Zhengfei." ”

In 1998, in order to let Li Yinan develop in an all-round way, Ren Zhengfei transferred Li Yinan away from the Central Research Department and transferred to the Marketing Department to engage in product promotion and marketing. However, because Li Yinan belongs to the typical "science and engineering man", it is difficult to adapt to public relations activities. Therefore, Li Yinan, who sat on the cold bench, felt depressed during this period.

In 2000, coinciding with the cold in the telecommunications industry, Ren Zhengfei published "Huawei's Winter" and encouraged employees to start their own businesses and become Huawei's agents, but prohibited departing employees from touching Huawei's forbidden area - communication business.

On the one hand, its own development is limited, on the other hand, the company provides a natural window. At the end of 2000, Li Yinan founded Harbor Network Co., Ltd. in Beijing with a dividend deposit of more than 10 million yuan that he had earned from years of struggle at Huawei.

With the contacts and technology accumulated at Huawei, Li Yinan's harbor network began to become a star in the industry as soon as it was founded. Official information shows that after 2001, the revenue of the harbor network began to grow exponentially. In 2002, sales soared from $147 million to $400 million, and in 2003, this figure doubled to $1 billion.

However, Li Yinan is not satisfied with only doing Huawei's downstream distribution business. By the end of 2003, Li Yinan used the merger with Juntian Technology to extend his tentacles to Huawei's forbidden area - the operator's optical transmission market. Overconfident Li Yinan will eventually pay the price.

In this regard, Ren Zhengfei said: "Huawei was filled with a vicious atmosphere at that time, shouting the slogan of 'the early days of capital were dirty', and joining forces to steal the company's technical secrets and trade secrets under the impetus of venture capital, as if it was very honorable." It was really stormy and made Huawei crumbling. ”

Subsequently, Huawei set up the "Anti-Harbor Work Office" headed by Ren Zhengfei to crack down on Li Yinan's harbor network in many ways. In the end, in the face of Huawei's "protracted war", the harbor network was difficult to support, and was acquired by Huawei in 2006, and Li Yinan also returned to Huawei.

However, after experiencing betrayal and compromise, Li Yinan and Huawei no longer have the previous water and milk blend. After surviving the agreement to "continue to work at Huawei for at least two years", in 2010, Li Yinan left Huawei to join Baidu as CTO.

Since then, Li Yinan's career journey has become messy. From the end of 2010 to the middle of 2014, he has worked for Baidu, Infinite Xunqi, GSR and other enterprises, but has never found his anchor.

Mavericks pave the way

2014, which can be called the first year of China's electric vehicles, all kinds of capital flocked to it. Li Yinan did not choose a good track, he chose to cut into the market volume will not be particularly large electric bicycle. Li Yinan and Hu Yilin founded Niu Electric (NIU. US)。 Then, with Li Yinan's strong background in the capital circle, Maverick Electric has received the blessing of many capital bosses.

However, in June 2015, just after the release of the Maverick Electric N1, Li Yinan was taken away by prosecutors at the Shenzhen airport and sentenced to two years and six months in prison and fined 7.5 million yuan. This is mainly because Li Yinan took advantage of his position to engage in 7 million yuan of stock insider trading during his tenure as an investor in GSR Jiangchuang.

This tragic experience made Li Yinan disappear for more than two years. It was not until March 2018 that Li Yinan, the founder and former CEO of Niudian Technology, had joined Meihua Angel Venture Capital and held the position of partner, and Li Yinan officially returned to the public vision.

Maverick Electric did not fall into a desperate situation because Li Yinan was caught, but led the way in the field of electric bicycles.

In October 2018, Maverick Electric was listed on the NASDAQ. According to the prospectus, Glory Achievement Fund Limited, which belonged to Maverick Electric founder Li Yinan, as of the IPO, was the company's largest shareholder, holding 59014235 shares of common stock, accounting for 43.8% of the total share capital.

From the financial report, in Q3 2021, the total revenue of Maverick Electric was 1.2264 billion yuan, an increase of 37.1% year-on-year; the net profit was 91.7 million yuan, an increase of 14.6% year-on-year. However, the shares held by Li Yinan have also dropped to 5%.

The experience of founding Maverick Electric is of great significance for Li Yinan to cut into electric vehicles in recent years. The automatic driving, battery, talent and other technologies accumulated by Maverick Electric for many years also have inherent advantages for Li Yinan to enter the new energy automobile industry.

In addition, the management of the Mavericks has also become the talent pool of Li Yinan's car. It is rumored that Liu Chuankai, vice president of Maverick Design, has joined the "Self-Touring Home" founded by Li Yinan, and will lead the styling design team of "Self-Traveling Home" in the future. It is understood that before joining Maverick, Liu Chuankai served as a design director at Designworks, a creative consulting company owned by BMW, and after joining Maverick, he led the conceptual design of Maverick Electric M1.

The same end

Li Yinan entered the game to build a car, and had to mention Li Xiang, the founder of Ideal Car.

Li Yinan and Li Xiang had known each other many years ago. It is reported that the acquaintance between Hu Yilin and Li Yinan is through Li's desire to tie the line.

Li Yinan also did not hide his friendship with Li Xiang, he said frankly, "Before building a car, Li wanted to give me a lot of sharing, others are very good, know everything." ”

However, this does not mean that Li Yinan and Li Xiang will stage the story of Lei Jun stealing Huang Zhang. Because from the perspective of technology and product positioning, Li Yinan did not maliciously touch the meaning of Porcelain Li Xiang.

However, Li Yinan and Li Xiang both chose the range increase route. When asked why he chose a range extender for his first product, Li Yinan said: "Choosing range extension is a compromise on reality. ”

This road is seen as a shortcut to the development of electric vehicles. Coincidentally, Huawei made the same choice.

From a technical point of view, the fuel and electricity dual-use range increase scheme, on the one hand, can avoid the problem of high battery cost when the upstream industrial chain of new energy vehicles climbs the capacity, on the other hand, the internal combustion engine as a generator can also enjoy the dividends of the fuel vehicle supply chain at the same time.

Will the ambitious Li Yinan form a direct competitive relationship with Huawei?

This can be seen from the price to the product positioning. Some media broke the news that Li Yinan's first product is expected to start at about 200,000 yuan and has 5 seats. In contrast, the M5 starts at 250,000 yuan and is also a 5-seater car.

From this point of view, after 20 years of going around, Li Yinan and Huawei are likely to become opponents again.

However, unlike Li Yinan who became a star in the communications industry through Huawei's shoulders 20 years ago, in the field of car building, Li Yinan does not seem to have the strength to break the wrist with Huawei.

This is not only from the mass production of the M5 nearly a year earlier than the self-touring NV, but also because Huawei has more funds and technical reserves than Li Yinan.

Li Bin, CEO of Weilai Automobile, once said that there is no 20 billion yuan not to build a car. When Xiaomi announced the construction of cars in early 2021, it also said that it would invest 10 billion yuan in the first phase and would continue to invest 10 billion US dollars in the next 10 years.

At the 2021 World New Energy Vehicle Conference in September 2021, Wang Jun, chief operating officer of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.'s Smart Vehicle Solution BU, said that since 2021, Huawei's R&D investment in the field of auto parts alone has exceeded $1 billion.

In contrast, Li Yinan's self-touring A round only received $500 million in financing. This is tantamount to a drop in the bucket for the tens of billions of car-making markets. In the past year, Li Yinan has reduced the previous 40% shareholding of Maverick Electric to 5%, which seems to pave the way for car building. Cut into the new energy vehicle track, the money is always insufficient.

It's just that Huawei and Ziyoujia are both recruits to new energy vehicles, and no one can say who will run out of the track in the future. Of course, Huawei has been "planning for a long time", especially in terms of automatic driving. In mid-2021, Huawei ranked second in the 2021 China Autonomous Driving Patent Rankings, second only to Baidu. On the other hand, the self-traveler is not well known, and perhaps Li Yinan will come up with more dry goods in the future.

From this point of view, when asked about the "advantages of NIUTRON", Li Yinan said that "I have no opinion", which does not seem to be modest.

Will Li Yinan, who squeezed into the new energy vehicle race track, directly PK with Huawei when the penetration rate of new energy vehicles exceeds 20% and the market competition intensifies? Even, Huawei will recruit this "former prince" again?

Perhaps, anything is possible.